Our Drift
The Drift & Dribble Miscellany is the artistic face of distinctive literary voices—many uncredentialed and unvetted by traditional gatekeepers—who focus on depth through creative impulse rather than promotional advancement. We foster and share work that discovers and reveals intelligent perspectives on humanity through the aesthetic (and at times playful) act of writing. We are the hidden ones: writing for art’s sake.*
Letter From the Editorial and Creative Director
Everybody has the best stories.
Some are unwelcome and change us, others flip our minds with their cleverness, and others are ginned up from the cranial vacuum and caused by overactive imaginations. These are wheels that have to spin. And then we craft them with varying degrees or mastery, ever since those first days around the fire when we only had miming and a vocabulary of grunts. It was a more entertaining way to learn life lessons without having to actually grapple with the beast. And now, continuing our part, while we’re here, we write to understand our place in a quickly changing world, and add our part to the narrative.
In a long career making a living as a creative I have many times found myself being pulled between the artistic and aesthetic experience and the need to make work commercially viable (to be able to continue on). The first part is absolutely the goal and the reason and--as creatives we learn--it’s crucial to keep coming back to, in order to stay healthy. Non-artistic temptations arrive as base distractions disguised as the goal, but we need to keep returning to what is important, and then the muse is sated and things work out, against all odds. My hope is that this can be a space where we avoid putting energy into those tasks that make careers—marketing, promotion, writing safe for bestseller lists and second-guessing the gate-keepers of Big Publishing—and take a deep dive, instead, on what’s happening in the air between our own sentences. Then let's hold on and see how it goes.
Pieces published here had their beginnings from my own personal connections to interesting people, both long-term and serendipitous, and branch out to our extended writing compatriots; from many alternate universes in the global community.
FULL TRANSPARENCY: As editorial and creative director, I have influence over the drift of this journal (while gambolling atop the wave of the work that you submit) and proudly embrace the literary lineage of editors shaping the conversation by adding their own writing (with restraint and humility) among the talents of others. The value we have is only in the depth of the material of the participating authors. In this Internet age we are all overrun with self-promoters and I would lose sleep if I found myself to be one of them. Creatives will understand that what propels us and what we aspire to is in service of the art. It really is that altruistic. We keep reminding ourselves to stay on the path, otherwise we feel off, like we’re wasting our precious lifetime. And what is important, especially for those that are sequestered away with their imaginations, is that we share what we do, otherwise it is all just vapor. And that’s why we are here. Contact me if you have an interesting project in mind.
-Raimer Rugh
Our Dribble
Daring to dabble.
The Art on the Miscellany
A Case for the Importance and Power of Art and Design
All images on the Drift & Dribble, unless identified otherwise, have been created by (the mysterious) chiara ife.
The most captivating illustrations have the qualities of fine art: as you contemplate them, recognition and appreciation come with or without understanding. Art with depth has longevity as it appears to change as we do, along with our eye as we revisit them, depending on where we are in our own artistic evolution. Like a symphony with repeating motifs, color, tone, texture, luminosity, pattern, rhythm and the semiotics of visual texture and icons: all these elements contribute to our ‘reading’ of the image as we each listen in our own way to the tones as they ring within our own visual cortex. And there are so many different ways to absorb them; the potential to strike us from more angles than we know. For some it is intellectual; the symbolism allowing for the right connections. For others it is intuitive, enriching the mood through tint or light—we remain animals that react to color—in a way that lands better in the irrational soul before the analytical voice decides whether it is ‘good’ or not. There are those who respond with excitement to the demands of complexity, of conundrum; of a thing beyond understanding or done in a hand that seems otherworldly or at least more deft than our own. There are those who delight at the simplicity of a strong simple idea done in a child’s hand (Why didn’t I think of that?). Many of us have shades of all of these viewers or are heavy in one camp or the other, and all are valid. If beauty is within the eye of the beholder then it is up to us to ‘see’ what the artist has lain before us in concert with the author, unawares or not, and according to our ability.
The aim of our illustrations is to set the tone for the prose ahead, suggesting at the promise of what follows the title and byline. Our aim is to avoid concrete details that are best spun up by the reader’s imagination while hinting at where the reader might enter and go. We hope, like great art, that our art is accessible to the different levels of the viewer; eye-candy for some, insightful or emotionally stirring or thought-provoking to others. That right-brained genius is rarely acknowledged as I humbly offer it now, though its principles surround us and impact the quality of our daily life. Unfortunately, artists remain on either the bottom of our society—in the stereotype of flaky impulsive slackers—or at the very top, creating priceless unattainable artifacts to be viewed in museums. We have not made room for them in our daily life. As we should.
The best aspire to create for art’s sake. chiara ife, who created a good share of the images in our miscellany, uses a pseudonym. 
She says she does it to keep her work, “Reckless and about something,” by which she means that she doesn’t want to be held accountable. She especially likes it when it is ‘Wrong but still works’. (The artistic and rebellious genes must be on the same strand.) Sometimes her work happens almost instantaneously and other times it takes many days but I have learned not to check in. Her pieces are ready when they ‘Click in’. She’s the one who knows; she’s the artist. Ask her to explain an image of hers and you will face the cloud that crosses her eyes—so I no longer ask. “If a joke is good, you wouldn’t have to explain it,” she said the very last time I asked, and I agree. Like all things creative: it’s personal.
We encourage all our visual creators to use pseudonyms or to do it anonymously. Just as many writers have found it to be a way to free themselves from other careers, or break from an expected voice or to deviate from simplistic preconceptions, artists should do whatever they need to do if it allows them to create without reserve. We want them to break the rules. And yes, of course they should be grandiose and idealistic and expansive. More people will get it if they go big.
A blank canvas is not easy, as we would think. What is preferred for creatives (of all types) is the kind of minimal scaffolding and mild parameters that are natural to a magazine like ours—the feel of a story, outer dimensions and proportions, deadlines, the choice of harmonic color within the collective of our other images--and then pleasing the daily whims of our designer, (Anything but blue this time). Edges provide the kind of limits from within which artists can do their thing: read the text, see it in their mind’s eye and express it through their preferred medium.
*We are evidence that thoughtful people live among us.
We don’t publish resumes. Work stands on its own.
Hats off to the ambitious who have mastered best-selling tricks, who habitually boot-up before coffee, compile and tap submission buttons like slot mashers in the hope of chalking up publishing credits. The effort that goes into mass-mailing query letters until one teeters on the top of a slush pile, is sure to lead to well-earned fortunes. Elsewhere. This daily commercial perseverence is worthy of some kind of award, but not one we have to offer.
We stand behind those who want to spend their days writing--the fraught way, free of formulas, restyling each sentence until it steps up and propels readers forward or unveils and drags down a plot full of holes, the author's hand reaching up through the Swiss cheese for help. Our creators are at risk of revealing chararacter—good or bad—but feel a need anyway. They are the ones wide-eyed at what is in front of their noses instead of what’s trending; struggling with half-sensical prose working itself out on their page; stunned at tangential delights peeking between the lines; seeking out what’s ephemeral and pursuing it as if it was leading somewhere; who find people entertaining and jot down their dialogue; who slow down mortality by extending moments into paragraphs; who find surprises in reordering words in phrases and have thoughts not yet articulated, not yet understood, and bumble ahead anyway.
And the creative types who embrace the potential in the prospect of a blinking cursor as if it’s the most important thing in the world? Those are the ones we want to hang with.
Aside from the upright and credentialed among us, the Cape Cod-based August Drift & Dribble Literary Society is a growing scrum of complicated and misunderstood writers teetering on linguistic audacity, daring to embrace the muddling that accompanies the artistic experiment (or at least jotting notes on stray envelopes). Let’s call it a tangle of souls straining to squeeze a bit of irony out of a phrase, clarity through well-placed commas or extension of sentences by em-dashes, and glowing euphoric at any bon mot or double-triple plot twist (or at a minimum: expert at removing any bits of tension out of our scenes).
Some among us prefer the anastrophe (Construction: awkward? Yes) while sniffing about for any serendipitous, rare, delish loquacious crumbs--probably hungry and typing in cafés--while regretfully unwinding purple prose toward a form passable and palatable to the gatekeepers of Big Publishing.
We are, in short, a shelter for those timid in character but bold in exclamation marks, who have abandoned IRAs and decent reputations to fend for ourselves by oxygenating off originality and depth--apologizing too often for any accidental misappropriation--and willing to lie through our teeth (or at least a little bit) to get at the truth.
Behind our respectable associates in the front row--while they are with us--we are rapscallions donning frivolously flowery and trippingly lyric adverbs who shamelessly “tell” in tangentially epic, unruly small-print sentences of novella-length chapters (many reams too many) that will never live to see the inside of a lithographic press or a bookseller’s takeaway bag.
But we are where the love is (and other preferred genres).
And where is that in this moment? Cowering behind pen names and muttering to ourselves our random rhyming ditties, pretending they’re odes to whichever faddish muse we’re currently enamored with.
We are: the creative types doing backstrokes in the soup (and also sitting at desks, the proper way).